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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

I thought the headline was mocking Shopify, not Spotify. It shows how little creativity we have in tech company naming.

I wonder which suffix is more popular, -ify, -ly, or -r.

The most hilarious startups are all called "get(name)"

I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"

My personal favourite is PostHog, which sounds like something one might say on Grindr.

It doesn't just sound like that, it was used to mean exactly what you think well before PostHog was founded. I'm still not sure if that was an accident or the founders were in on the joke.

I am obviously incredibly ignorant (not that I’d normally think so — but here I have no idea!) but I can’t think of what this means.

Would you mind explaining please?

Hog is slang for human male genitalia. Given that, the company's name is an imperative command to share photos of such.

Grindr is a hookup app for gay men. "Hog" is slang for penis, so one might ask someone to "post hog" if they would like him to send a picture of his penis.

It worked for thefacebook.com.

Reasoning:

.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.

As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).

These days, it's -ai. All those SomethingAI names won't age well, and will be dated sooner than the proprietors think

Totally! I thought this would be from an app developer lamenting Shopify’s transition from REST to GraphQL…

It's mostly about domain names, real words are all gone long ago so people self-funding the early days chose the real words with modifiers.

I feel like -r is an old school internet thing. I wonder if anybody has data for trends over time.

Feels like late 2000s to very early 2010s. And note that it was never -er, the -r was invariably preceded by a consonant. Thankfully, subsequent naming schemes stopped disemvoweling words.

Not quite "never": e.g. Napster

I think they mean -r as in Tumblr

Innocent times. I miss this period of the internet.

grindr, vultr, gettr, et al

i know it as a "web 2.0 thing", but i guess that counts as old-school internet now.

that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.

US and USSR

My next startup will be called Rifyly

getrifyly.app is available.

RifylyAI to keep up with the times.

Names are hard. I'd say it says more about how little creativity we have in tech company business models

-alate, -ster, etc. :-)

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